A Contrastive- Acoustic Study of Jacqueline Kennedy and the Actress Natalie Portman’s Voice Qualities in the Film” Jacki”.

Abstract

As performers in a social world, we communicate with other people by sharing information on many different levels. Each utterance includes linguistic information and conveys much information about the speaker’s identity. Variation in voice quality indexes information about the speaker and marks the speaker’s identity as a unique individual. The present study aims to validate the belief that each individual has an inalienable voice print that can’t be imitated. The study verifies that, even the more similar personality between two individuals, or the close position in society the variance is voice quality. The acoustic analysis is performed via analysing the acoustic parameters namely: the fundamental frequency, amplitude, intensity, duration and pitch of Jacqueline Kennedy and the actress Natalie Portman who performed Kennedy’s character in the film “ Jacki”. The results show that Kennedy’s voice quality is breathy; whereas, Portman’s voice quality is falsetto. The study concludes that it is possible to recognise the identity of any individual from the properties of her/his voice quality due to the fact that each person has an unparalleled voice print.